The other day, the Turkish newspaper Tarafran a story about the efforts of Mesut Elfeti to justice the people responsible for his father's death. The body of Elfeti's father, Abdullah Elfeti, was found two months after he was detained by the local gendarmerie in March of 1995.

Elfeti's death is one of twenty-five killings for which Colonel Cemal Temizöz, commander of the gendarmerie for the district of Kayseri, is being questioned. Temizöz is currently being held in a military detention facility.

The killings--all of which occurred in the southeast of Turkey, where Temizöz was then stationed--are thought to have taken place within the context of a pattern of illegal behavior undertaken by Turkish military and security forces. Nobody knows for sure how many unsolved mystery killings could be traced back to state authorities, but estimates range in the tens of thousands. Recently, Ahmet Türk--leader of the Democratic Society Party (DTP), a party associated with issues pertaining to Kurdish rights--said there were 17 thousand such cases in Turkey.

The ostensible rationale behind the emergence of state-sponsored death squads in Turkey was the Turkish government's battle against the PKK in the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, however, it also seems likely that much of this activity amounted to free-lancing on the part of local authorities, who were allowed to shake down businessmen for personal profit without having to fear that they would be held accountable for their actions.

When I was living in Istanbul in the 1990s, the Susurluk scandal briefly opened a window onto these activities. Susurluk is the name of a town in western Turkey where a car accident in November of 1996 revealed that a member of parliament, Sedat Bucak (who survived the crash), had been riding with a wanted assassin named Abdullah Çatli (who died in the accident). In the car were also a number of government-issued weapons, silencers, thousands of dollars in cash, and numerous green (privileged) passports issued to Çatli in a variety of aliases--all of them signed by Mehmet Ağar, who was then Turkey's Interior minister. (Here is something I wrote on Susurluk back in the 90s, and here is a more recent discussion in the context of the Ergenekon trial).

The investigation into the "deep state" (derin devlet, the term employed by people in Turkey in reference to state-sponsored crimes of this sort) eventually ran aground when parliament refused to lift the parliamentary immunity of Bucak and Ağar. Before long, political instability and the emergence of a government dominated by the Refah Party of Necmettin Erbakan turned people's attention away from the scandal, as did the Turkish military's intervention into politics and the establishment of what became known as the "February 28 process" in Turkey.

The window onto the deep state was again briefly opened two years ago, when government raids on a house in the Umraniye district of Istanbul appeared to produce a list of assassination targets--in many cases, Kurdish businessmen and politicians. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan, who in the following months would be targeted by government prosecutors in an effort to close Erdoğan's AK Party, gave an interview with Hakan Çelik of the newspaper Posta, in which he hinted at the significance of the Ümraniye findings as part of a larger effort to defeat the deep state. "Look and see where the Ümraniye events lead to. Whose names will emerge from them? These things are very interesting. Who did the bombs which were discovered belong to?"

As I've written about in numerous posts on this blog, the Ergenekon investigation--which is what emerged from the Umraniye raid--has taken a strange path indeed. What began as an investigation into the state's role in extra-legal killings has been turned into a search for coup plotters allegedly seeking to overthrow Erdogan's AK Party government. Mustafa Balbay, the Ankara bureau chief for the opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, has been in prison since March 5 of this year, joining the ranks of dozens of academicians, journalists, and civil society figures who have likewise been implicated, detained, and imprisoned. Meanwhile, seemingly obvious candidates for police questioning into deep state matters (like Sedat Bucak of Susurluk fame) remain free.

When you look at Turkish newspapers these days, there's a truly sad tendency to tell only one part of this story. Taraf does a great job of relating stories like that relating to Elfeti, but for whatever reason is strangely uncritical of the overall direction that the Ergenekon trial has been taking. To read the pages of Taraf (which, as I've discussed elsewhere, is an influential news source for foreigners who write on Turkey professionally), one would never get the impression that the focus of the Ergenekon investigation has changed dramatically over the past eighteen months, or that the timing of this shift coincided with the beginning of the AK Party's struggle for survival against closure.

Meanwhile, opposition newspapers like Cumhuriyet and the various Doğan Group papers (including Hürriyet and Radikal, whose owner has recently been the target of a major tax investigation) write frequently on the dubious direction of the Ergenekon investigation but relatively little about the horrible and intolerable crimes which prompted popular desire for an uncovering of the deep state to begin with. Opposition leader Deniz Baykal of the Republican People's Party (CHP) has denounced the Ergenekon investigation as "a political trial, not a legal one."

Amid the politicization of Ergenekon and fears that the government has been abusing this investigation to go after its political rivals, the crimes that are allegedly connected to the state may end up getting lost in the shuffle.

It's been a busy week or so since getting back to Istanbul last Sunday. I'm heading off again for the United States on Thursday of next week, so basically I've been hitting the archives, seeing friends, and trying desperately to finish up some work that I'd really like to complete before leaving Turkey. I hope to spend most of this summer working on a manuscript for a book, so before getting back to Michigan I hope to be able to mail off an article that I've been kicking around for the last few months.

From the Borderlands Lodge...

I am an historian of the Turkic World with over 20 years of experience living in and writing about Turkey and the former USSR. My first impressions of the region came when I was working as an English teacher in Istanbul from 1992-1999. During these years I traveled extensively in the Balkans, Turkey, the former USSR, the Middle East and Asia, and studied Russian and Hungarian in addition to Turkish before returning to the US to pursue a graduate education.

After receiving an MA and PhD from Princeton and Brown universities, I held research fellowships with the NEH/American Research Institute in Turkey, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Since August of 2009 I have been a professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University in the cool little ski town of Bozeman, MT, holding the rank of associate professor since 2015. My first book, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, was published by Oxford University Press in November of 2014.

I am spending the 2016-2017 academic year in Russia through the support of a Fulbright research scholar grant.

Find me on...

Turks Across Empires

Oxford University Press, 2014

Reviews of Turks Across Empires

"...path-breaking...Meyer demonstrates brilliantly the shifts in articulation of cultural and political identities as well as change of the specific vocabulary in the written texts of the Turkic intellectuals."--Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

"...a skillfully crafted and soundly constructed account...Meyer's book is a page-turner, admittedly not a common trait in scholarly history works. It frequently turns into a sort of amusement park for historians, where the author parades so many newly unearthed, rich in detail, and immensely informative archival documents...finely tackles somewhat delicate yet thorny matters such as Turkism, Pan-Turkism, Ottomanism, and Islamism, as well as addresses the lives of humans who were doomed and perished or sometimes enriched and saved by those very same matters." --American Historical Review

"This thoroughly researched monograph offers a noteworthy caveat to the infatuation with 'identity' that for almost two decades characterized the post-Soviet scholarship on the non-Russian peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires...Meyer leaves us convinced that discourses and claims of identity need to be understood in relation to concrete power configurations and resulting opportunities, and not as articulations of perennial or even would-be nationhood." -- Russian Review

"James Meyer's Turks across Empires is a very valuable and intriguing reassessment of the origins of pan-Turkism through an in-depth examination of some of its leading figures...a great pleasure to read...Meyer's book is 'revisionist' in the sense that it successfully challenges many assumptions and arguments in the study of Russia's Muslims and pan-Turkism...provides a more complete, flesh-and-bone biographical reconstruction of these intellectuals and their milieu...the depiction of Kazan Tatars as 'insider Muslims' of Tsarist Russia is simply brilliant."--Turkish Review

"[Turks Across Empires] presents a wealth of information drawn from archives, periodical publications, memoirs, and other documentary evidence in the languages needed for such a study: Ottoman, Russian, Tatar, and the Turkic of Azerbaijan... As a result, Meyer’s narrative fills in gaps and makes connections that nicely complement the steadily expanding literature on the late Ottoman/late Romanov period and the Turks who shaped their own and wider Turkic identities in that era. By extension, the identity question has profound implications for twentieth and even twenty-first century intellectual and political trajectories."--Review of Middle East Studies

"Based on an impressive array of sources from Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, James Meyer’s monograph not only expands the knowledge about the Muslims of Russia but also provides a widely applicable argument about instrumentalization of identity in different political contexts." --Council for European Studies

"James Meyer pursues an imaginative approach to the final decades of the Russian and Ottoman Empires by focusing on the biographies of three activists—a Crimean Tatar, an Azerbaijani, and a Volga Tatar—who, while born in Russia, were men with substantial interest and experi- ence traveling to and living in the empire’s southern neighbor. Biography becomes, thus, the modus operandi for unraveling the roles of these and similar men—“trans-imperial people,” as Meyer calls them—in propagating pan-Turkism and suggesting it as a new identity for Turks, who were also overwhelmingly Muslim, everywhere."--Slavic Review

"A major contribution of this work is its use of original source material in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish and Russian. Using personal correspondence and Ottoman and Russian tsarist era archives, Meyer traces four distinct periods to their trans-imperial existence moving back and forth between Istanbul, Kazan, Crimea, and Azerbaijan...an important contribution in several ways."--Turkish Area Studies Review

"…the book does a very good job in bringing the complexities ofRussia’s Muslim intellectual life of the late imperial period close to a readership broadly interested in the modernization of Russia’s peripheries and in Russian-Ottoman relations… Meyer convincingly demonstrates that since the 1870s Muslim communities in inner Russia perceived the state as a threat, especially in view of the administrative attempts at taking control over Muslim schools."--Journal of World History

"...impressive...James Meyer’s book is a collective biography of the most prominent pan-Turkists—Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869–1939), and İsmail Gasprinskii (1851–1914)—by means of which the author reveals the patterns of migration from the Middle Volga, Southeast Caucasus, and Crimea to the Ottoman lands and back, as well as local politics in each protagonist’s original region…The fruit of this admirable exercise is most visible when Meyer demonstrates the simultaneous formation of population policy on both the Russian and Ottoman shores of the Black Sea."--Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

"Few Ottomanists understand the complexities of the situation of Muslims in the Russian Empire, while scholars of the Russian Empire have tended to imagine the Ottoman Empire only in broad brushstrokes. Meyer is one of a small new crop of scholars who possess the requisite skills…The narrative is richly documented and thick—perhaps the best account of Volga–Ural public life in English…" --International Journal of Middle East Studies

"Meyer, assistant professor of Islamic world history at Montana State University, draws from Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian archives to bridge the gap between borderlands and peoples in this innovative study of the origins of pan-Turkism. Tautly argued and empirically grounded, the book highlights the diverse nature of identity formulation during the late imperial era, when the forces of modernity presented new challenges to traditional religious communities".--Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Turks Across Empires is deeply-researched, drawing on sources in Russian and multiple Turkic languages from no fewer than thirteen archives in the former Soviet Union and Turkey. This research is showcased beautifully in chapter one (‘Trans-Imperial People’), which is a superb, groundbreaking introduction to the large demographic of Muslims who — like Akcura, Gasprinskii and Agaoglu — moved between the Russian and Ottoman Empires"--Slavonic and East European Review